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The Evolution of U.S. Economics Textbooks
By
David Colander
October 2010
MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE ECONOMICS DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 10-37
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS
MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE
MIDDLEBURY, VERMONT 05753
http://www.middlebury.edu/~econ
THE EVOLUTION OF U.S. ECONOMICS TEXTBOOKS1
David Colander
Middlebury College
Department of Economics
Paul Samuelson’s comment, "I don't care who writes a nation's laws -- or crafts its
advanced treatises -- if I can write its economics textbooks" (Nassar, 1995) captures the
important of textbooks. It suggests that there is much is to be learned about society and
the economics profession by a consideration of its textbooks, and their evolution. In this
paper I briefly consider the evolution of US economics texts from 1830 to the present I
concentrate on how their goals have changed over the years, and discuss how those goals
reflected their view of what economists knew.
The argument of the paper is the following. From 1830 until 1930, economic texts
were attempting to teach precepts—educating common sense about economic policy as
they saw it. That goal also reflected what they saw themselves doing as economists.
Then, in the 1930s there was a change in what the profession saw as its role. It
started to see itself more as a pure science, and also started to believe that one could draw
lessons about policy from that pure science. That brought about with it a change in the
texts, and starting in 1950s, economic textbooks took on a quite different structure. That
structure was first seen in Samuelson (1948) but his book became the template for almost
all key books after that up until 2010.
This template remained the textbook template even though, by the 1970s, the
approach it reflected , (which some would call the neoclassical) had been abandoned by
the cutting edge of the profession, with more and more movement away from it occurring
over the next forty years as avenues of thought were explored, and new technologies
were developed. During this people economics moved away from the strict reliance on
the supply/demand model, introduced much more empirical work into its analysis, and
switched its core modelling techniques to game theory. By the 2000s these changes had
led to the development of an active behavioural economics and the introduction of lab
experiments as a standard tool of economics.
The economic texts, however, did not change with the profession, and as of 2010
most texts had not incorporated that new approach in their core structure. This has
created a gap between what economists do and what they teach. (Colander, 2005).As
more and more of the stock of teaching economists become trained in these new
approaches and methods, we can expect to see a major change in the texts.
1830s-1930s: Economists as Preachers.
1
This paper is a modification of Colander, 2006.
U.S. Textbooks
My consideration of this period will be on three top-selling texts: Francis
Wayland’s The Elements of Political Economy, first published in 1837 and in print in
various editions until 1875 (and adapted versions well into the 1880s), Francis Walker’s
Political Economy, which was a top selling U.S. text from 1883 to 1908, and Edwin
Seligman’s Principles of Economics, which went through twelve editions from 1905 to
1929. I will also briefly discuss the text, Pure Economics by Maffeo Pantaleoni, which
was translated from Italian into English in 1898. This book, while not a top-selling U.S.
text, is important because it represents the beginning of the divergence between what U.S.
economists teach and what U.S. economists do, and is a precursor to the later texts,
although, unlike Pantaleoni, the later texts tried to draw policy conclusions from the
models presented in principles, whereas Pantaleoni explicitly did not do so.
Three observations
Let me begin my discussion of this period with three observations. The first is that,
in the time period I am considering, the U.S. was not the center of the economics
profession as it is today; then the center was Europe. U.S. texts reflected the debates that
were going on in Europe, but U.S. economists were not central players in the debates.2
Thus, in a way the U.S./European roles were reversed from what they became in later
periods. By that I mean that much of what U.S. economists did during this period
followed from what European economists did, and that European texts, not American
texts, set the template for what economists did, and for what they taught. U.S. texts were,
in many ways, modification of European texts, adapted for the U.S. situation.3 In the
English language, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and Marshall were seen as providing the canon,
and the U.S. textbooks attempted to convey that canon, modified for the U.S. students, to
U.S. students.
In the later part of this period the Methodenstreit led to deep divisions in
European economics, and to alternative ways of doing and thinking about economics.
That Methodenstreit was less apparent in the U.S. at the turn of the century because the
U.S. economics profession was dominated by economists strongly influenced by the
German historical school. This changed over time, but until the 1940s, institutionalists
and progressives dominated the American Economic Association. They saw economics
as primarily a discursive field, where theory offered little help, and ideas mattered most.4
This domination is important because the approach followed by the German historical
school allowed a closer connection between what economists did and what they taught
than the alternative formal approach would have.
The second observation is that over the time period from 1830 to 1930 the U.S.
economics profession was evolving. In the early part of the period, U.S. economists, and
2
Not being part of the central debate has advantages; it allows one to focus on policy issues more relevant
to one’s country’s particular issues, rather than trying to maintain a more universal perspective.
3
For example, because of the abundance of land in the U.S. texts gave much less focus to rent and
diminishing returns.
4
For example, in 1941, Paul Sameulson and Wolfgang Stolper’s paper on the theory of international trade
was rejected at the American Economic Review as being a narrow stury in formal theory that added little to
the literature.
2
U.S. Textbooks
educators generally, were primarily ministers, and economics was seen as part of a
broader moral philosophy, not as a separable subject.5 It was taught as single course,
usually to upper-level students; thus, for most students principles of economics was not
the beginning of a course of study as it is today; it was the entire study.6 The point is that
economics was seen as simply an aspect of philosophy, and was often defined as the
science of wealth. For example, in his definition of political economy, Francis Walker
writes «Political economy, or economics, is the name of that body of knowledge which
relates to wealth. Political Economy has to do with no other subject, whatsoever, than
wealth» (Walker 1987). The almost theological nature of economics instruction slowly
waned over the period, as economics became a more established, and separable, subject,
but for the primary texts in the U.S. that I consider, the economics presented in the texts
remained much more related to moral philosophy than to what we would today consider a
scientific approach. While there was much discussion about how economics was
scientific in the texts, little of what we would today see as science shows up in the texts.
The texts during this period did not try to teach pure economic science.
A third observation is that while the name given to the study of economics
changed over this time period, with the books calling the field of study ‘political
economy’ initially, and ‘economics’ at the end of the period, the subject matter of the
texts remained much more in what would now be considered political economy, not
economic science. Maffeo Pantaleoni’s book (1889; English translation 1898) which
would be considered more scientific, was called pure economics, to distinguish it from
the type of economics presented in the other texts.
1830-1870: Francis Wayland’s Political Economy
The first book I consider in this period was entitled Political Economy. It was
written by Francis Wayland in 1837, and was highly successful; it was the largest selling
book in the U.S. during much of this period, with estimates of cumulative sales of 40,000
books in 1867, and it continued to be sold in revised form through the 1880s.7 Wayland,
like many of the economists and authors of economics textbooks at the time, was an
ordained minister and administrator. (Wayland became president of Brown University,
after which he went back to the ministry.) This is important to the question I am
addressing because Wayland was representative of what economists did during this early
time period. What they did was to philosophize; economics was one area in which they
philosophized, and they were careful to make that clear to the students. Economics was
part of a broader moral philosophy. What they did was not exclusively, or even primarily,
economics. Economics was a side interest of theirs that happened to generate significant
interest from students, for the same reason that economics generates interest in students
now – because it seems more relevant to business, and to students’ every day concerns,
than does much of what they study.
5
One book on this period (O’CONNOR 1944) calls the period from 1830-1870 the «clerical» school of
economics.
6
Marshall first got a separate tripos in economics at Cambridge in the late 1800s, and it was only at the
turn of the century that graduate studies in economics became possible.
7
My references are to the 1886 edition, which was modified by A.L. Chapin (WAYLAND, CHAPIN 1886).
3
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